A Review of Robust Image Enhancement Algorithms and Their Applications

The essential target of image enhancement is to minimize noise from a digital image by keeping the intrinsic information of the image preserved. The main difficulty in image enhancement is determining the criteria for enhancement and, therefore, more than one image enhancement techniques are empirical and require interactive procedures to obtain satisfactory results. In this paper robust image enhancement algorithms are discussed, implemented to noisy images and compared according to their robustness. The algorithms are especially able to improve the contrast of medical images, fingerprint images and selenography images by means of software techniques. When deciding that one image has better quality than another image, quality measure metrics are needed. Otherwise comparing image quality just by visual appearance may not be objective because images could vary from person to person. That is why quantitative metrics are crucial to compare images for their qualities. In this paper Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Mean Squared Error (MSE) quality measure metrics are used to compare the image enhancement methods systematically. All the methods are validated by the performance measures with PSNR and MSE. It is believed that this paper will provide comprehensive reference source for the researchers involved in image enhancement field.